Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Synopsis (from B&N): "Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, Tender Is the Night is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver; the bewitching, wealthy, and dangerously unstable mental patient, Nicole, who becomes his wife; and the beautiful, harrowing ten-year pas de deux they act out along the border between sanity and madness.

In Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald deliberately set out to write the most ambitious and far-reaching novel of his career, experimenting radically with narrative conventions of chronology and point of view and drawing on early breakthroughs in psychiatry to enrich his account of the makeup and breakdown of character and culture.

Tender Is the Night is also the most intensely, even painfully, autobiographical of Fitzgerald's novels; it smolders with a dark, bitter vitality because it is so utterly true. This account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife's derangement and a lifestyle that gnaws away at his sense of moral values offers an authorial cri de coeur, while Dick Diver's downward spiral into alcoholic dissolution is an eerie portent of Fitzgerald's own fate."

Fiction or Nonfiction: Fiction

Comments and Critique: I definitely agree with the statement in the synopsis that this was one of Fitzgerald's most ambitious and autobiographical novels. Whenever I read a novel by an author I've read before, I can't help but compare the works, and I found myself continually comparing this one to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's most famous work. I didn't love this novel as much as Gatsby, but in some ways it was a better work. You feel the characters' emotions more closely, so that some parts almost hurt you to read. The author gets more into the core of his characters here than he did in other works. Gatsby is a cleaner, more precisely written novel, but this one strikes closer to the bone.

The autobiographical nature of the book also jumps out at you throughout. I've heard that authors are constantly asked how much of themselves they put into their books and often the readers see more than is really there, but in this case you just know that it's not all fiction. I'm very curious to read more about Fitzgerald's life now and to see what critics have said about this book over the years.